The initial S-1 documentation for CoreWeave’s upcoming IPO is full of surprises.
CoreWeave runs AI-specific cloud services from its network of 32 data centers with NVIDIA support, which collectively owns more than 250,000 NVIDIA GPUs by the end of 2024, according to the company. Since then, it has additional Many of NVIDIA’s latest products, Blackwell, support AI reasoning.
While we don’t know how many shares of Coreweave are planned for sale or at what price, IPO experts are Renaissance capital It is estimated that the company hopes to raise at least $3.5 billion at a valuation of $32 billion, possibly more than $4 billion.
It’s a big, but not in the last valuation in November, when the mid-level stock closed at $650 million, which was worth $23 billion, Reuters report.
One surprising thing in the filings is that the company’s three co-founders have sold most of their A-level holdings in 2024 bidding offers and a 2023 A-level holding. Regardless of what happens in the IPO, the co-founder has cashed in nearly $488 million in stock.
Specifically, in these two tender offers, Co-founder CEO and Chairman Michael Intrator sold about $160 million worth of shares; Co-founder and Chief Strategy Officer Brian Venturo sold about $177 million worth of shares; and Co-founder and Chief Development Officer Brannin McBee sold about $151 million worth of shares.
Although now owning less than 3% of Class A shares, the trio will retain control of the company through majority ownership of Coreweave’s Class B shares, which has 10 votes per share. They currently control about 80% of the vote.
Another unusual thing about this company is that the background of these three is actually in finance, not technology. They come from the oil industry hedge funds. Prior to CoreWeave, Intrator established and operated a natural gas hedge fund in partnership with Venturo. S-1 said McBee was previously a trader for another such hedge fund.
To strengthen the technical ribs, they hired Chen Goldberg of Google Cloud as senior vice president of engineering at Coreweave. She has been leading Google’s Kubernetes and serverless teams before.
NVIDIA has over 6% stake in CoreWeave and is also a user of Coreweave – a strong alliance. With a large number of NVIDIA GPUs, CoreWeave’s revenue grew: $1.9 billion in 2024, up nearly eight times from $228,943 in 2023.
But, as others have pointed out, one client, Microsoft, accounts for 62% of revenue. Interestingly, Coreweave calls Microsoft a customer and competitor, just like IBM.
Even so, CoreWeave’s list of customers is enviable, including Cohere, Meta and Mistral, it says.
Despite revenue growth, Coreweave remains unprofitable, with a drop of $863 million in 2024 alone. It has $7.9 billion in debt on its books.
Founders use their financial expertise to take debt as a function rather than a burden. They call their financial situation “delicate” and even say they “created loans backed by GPU infrastructure.” Their GPU series is extremely valuable and can be used as collateral.
Still, the debt repayment costs came at a high price, with $941 million in 2024 alone, causing losses to the company. Coreweave said it may use at least some of the funds raised in the IPO to reduce its debt burden.
It remains to be seen how popular IPOs are. But people are eager to support any company that generates a lot of revenue on AI, and CoreWeave certainly does that.
CoreWeave declined further comments.
